Building a Mixing Business: My Conversation with Brian Funk

Brian Funk has spent 436 episodes of the Music Production Podcast talking with people about how music actually gets made. Ours opened with something most of us know firsthand: someone asks you to do the work, and you have no idea what to say when it comes to the price. That's the gap The Business of Mixing exists for, so we started there and spent the next hour and twenty minutes on what sits underneath it: what we tell ourselves, how trust gets built, which work to turn down, and what this career looks like day to day. We're both from New York, so it stayed direct.

Key Moments

"Being good at mixing and running a great mix business are completely separate things."

"What makes a super defensible business is one that is constantly bringing in new learning."

"I'm the artist running a mix business, instead of I'm a business owner running a mix business."

"I need to hear this, otherwise I'll continue to feel less comfortable around you. Well then give them a warm blanket if it's cold."

"You don't have to talk about compression ever, and they will trust that."

"It is important to know that you can fire clients. Sometimes you really should."

Mixing Is Only Part Of It

People tend to treat being good at mixing and running a good mix business as nearly the same skill. I'd say they overlap by maybe 5%, and people assume it's 95, or even 100. For me the overlap is the delivery phase, when you're actually delivering the work. Everything else has to do with things that aren't mixing.

That's why I don't teach mixing, and it's the same thing I tell clients about their own work. Being specific about what you offer lets you get better at it, makes your message clearer, and saves you from building new processes and new things to promote every time you add a service. If I did everything, people would have to ask what I'm really good at. The answer gets ambiguous fast.

You do need the foundation. Most people are very self-aware about this and will tell me they're not ready yet, that they're still figuring out how to mix and get their room right. I respect that. I'm not here putting lipstick on a pig.

The part that still surprises me: people consistently come back and say they got so much better at mixing from working on their business, even though we never talked about it. They started asking clients what they needed up front, which saved time in the mix later. They streamlined their email, then realized they could do the same thing to their mix workflow. Improving a system isn't specific to one discipline.

Your Process Has More Than Three Steps

Ask a lot of mixers to describe their process and you get three steps: a song comes in, I mix it, I send it off. I've broken that same process into anywhere from 25 to 60 steps, depending on how granular you want to be. Go too granular and you get lost in it. Zoom out too far and you can't really affect the system.

Once you can see the steps, you can ask how each one is going. Are people moving through it successfully? If not, where, and why? And a problem at step 25 is usually the result of something in step 24, or 23, or 21.

I'm more interested in what didn't work. "It went well" isn't always that helpful unless you did something remarkably different. The honest look comes first, before you start changing things, and it might turn up holes in 25 places. That's okay. When I looked at my own process in year one, one I barely even had, every part of it had problems. Commit to a business for a decade and those things get better and better.

Set The Business Up To Learn

You can't be a business without learning, and it doesn't happen by accident. Even a price change can be a question. Do I want to find out if I can go higher for a year? Do I want to know if a lower price gets more people in? If the decision is rooted in wanting to learn something, you get an answer you can fold back into the business.

For most people, learning isn't the priority. Survival mode is, and just doing things is. But when learning comes first, you get a double benefit: even if something fails, you still have the chance to come away with something. Brian takes the same approach to making music. Try a different way of micing, or a different song structure, and it's only a failure if you get nothing out of it.

I like the phrase "you win or you learn." And when you win, the learning often isn't that exciting. People tell me how cool something was, and what I took from it was that it was hard to get there. All the work nobody saw is what got you there.

The Things We Say Without Noticing

Brian asked what kind of language works against mixers and engineers. At the core, I think it's a disbelief in yourself. That sounds simple, and "believe in yourself" gets thrown around all the time, but it's actually quite hard. It isn't something you either have or you don't. You can learn it. Some people learned it young, from a family or a community that modeled it. Plenty of people didn't.

It also shows up quietly, which is why it helps to have someone outside of you listening. You'll say something fast, one negative word in a sentence, and it's easy to skip. "I know I'll never win a Grammy, but..." And it's not really about Grammys. That's the disbelief coming to the surface, and being reinforced, because you said it to someone and they reflect it back at you.

When I'm coaching someone, I write down the negative things they say about themselves in our first couple of meetings. It's plentiful. Then I hand it back to them. We take the loudest ones, the ones so familiar they're like an old friend, and rewrite them, and it goes on a Post-it on their monitor. So on a rough day, alone in the room, when the old story starts to stir, there's a note in front of them that they wrote in a better moment. Both things are true. Now they can see both.

A friend visiting from out of town spent the whole trip telling me why her business wasn't going to work. Finally I said, "You know what? I agree." She asked what I meant. I told her I didn't think it was going to work because she kept telling me it wasn't going to work, and I wasn't hearing how she'd make it work. Our brain can only do so much. It focuses in on what we tell it.

From Artist To Business Owner

Brian brought up something I've thought about a lot: "the music should speak for itself." My theory is that a lot of us got into music because we didn't want to get into business, or anything else that felt too technical and not creative enough. Mixers and producers often start as performers. They try that, maybe tour, maybe land in a big band, and then they decide they want something more serious that's still in the arts. So they build a career in audio.

But narratives don't just disappear. You become a business owner without knowing it, and you run the business on beliefs from a different identity. Typically the first shift is "I'm a mixer," period. The next is "I'm a mixer and I have a mix business, so why am I not getting work?" The third is the one I push people toward: "I'm a business owner who runs a mix business. And sometimes in that business, I mix."

Brian described the feeling well: asking for money can seem like the part you never were, because you were the artist. "I am" and "I'm not" are the words I listen for. None of this means picking one identity forever. We hold multitudes. Think of it like EQ. You don't need to be a business owner on a date at the movies, so let that part be a little quieter. The trouble starts when an identity gets rigid, or when you never take on the one the job actually requires.

Three Kinds Of Trust

Artists usually aren't comparing mixers side by side. They're deciding who they can trust with the record, and I break that into three kinds. I've written about this for Hypebot too.

Social trust is borrowed. Trust takes such a long time that we're always building it by proxy. Someone who never cared about me might give me a chance because I'm on a show they love. It's the artists you've worked with and the peers you're around now. And it doesn't need to be the biggest names. Sometimes people find me through a big name. Other times they say, "I saw that you worked with my friend, and that's why I hired you." We're all using signals to judge whether we can trust someone.

Technical trust is whether you can do what you say. This is where a lot of engineers overdo it, making content that's all technical when that's the last thing artists are really interested in. They do want to know you can mix. Proving it just doesn't take much.

Emotional trust is how you make someone feel, and artists often weigh it more than the other two. There are people who are really good at what they do that I just can't hang out with. I'm pretty direct, and if that doesn't gel with you, it won't matter how good I am or who I've worked with. In one of my first recording sessions I could not play on time, and I'd been a drummer since I was a little kid. I was nervous and didn't feel safe making mistakes.

This isn't telling people what they want to hear. If you're lying, don't do it. It's that going from "we don't know each other" to "we still don't know each other, but it doesn't feel like we don't" changes everything that comes after. You have that microphone? I know the guy. You're from Long Island? So am I.

Vanity Infrastructure

Someone told me recently that they'd seen a website I designed for an engineer and might hit me up for one. I told them I don't make websites. I'll make one when I think it gives someone an outsized advantage for what they're trying to do, but it's not why you come to me.

When someone arrives looking for the website, I can tell right away their motivations are off. I call it vanity infrastructure, as opposed to revenue-based infrastructure. They want to look like they have a business, more than they want to build one. I've taken on people like that and convinced them to go through the work anyway, and the entire time I was pushing left, they were pulling right. You win or you learn.

You Can Fire A Client

Brian made the point that the work you take outside what you really do is usually the work that stresses you out the most, and that early on it's tempting to jump at anything that bites the line. I get that. When you're new, you're still learning what failure even looks like. But if you've learned the same lesson three times and you're still saying yes, that's something else.

I don't want to resent clients who are paying me. I once looked up someone who had just paid me, found out they were also running a coaching business, and sent the money back. The money's always nice. But the cost of taking on someone you won't enjoy being around, on a deep level and not just a little bratty level, is high.

So I give people the door many times, and sometimes I literally show them the door. It doesn't happen often. But clients aren't the only ones who get to end it, and catering to everyone who wants to reshape your business carries the bigger risk.

There Is No Right Configuration

Full-time, part-time, a job plus mixing, audio and nothing else. People get fixated on a configuration before they've done the work that would tell them how to be configured. There isn't a right way. It's going to be different for everyone, and it keeps changing as the economy and the opportunities change. You can be full-time, go part-time, go back, or stop completely.

I've spoken with people who have a good full-time job and a healthy stream of mixes, and they're sure they want to mix full-time. So I lay out the trade-off they're about to make. A lot of times, what they value most from that conversation is realizing they don't want it. One person called me a few weeks after we talked to say he was going back to the work he did before. Awesome.

Pricing trickles down from all of this, which is why it's so tricky. I have a client whose living situation means he only needs about $20,000 a year. Two big productions could cover it. Or he can price lower and be more competitive. Each path gives you a different kind of leverage, and all of them have trade-offs. What you want from your life, what the market says, what you charged before and who your market is all go in. It's a problem with a lot of variables, but it isn't infinitely complex.

Brian has a version of this from early on: little two-week tours, a lot of fun, then coming home with no money, completely worn out, and learning how much being home mattered. You don't always see that part when you're imagining it.

Form And Function

When people ask what I do, I usually say I work in the music industry. But that's so broad. It doesn't mean every day is a festival. Where a job sits in the industry and what you do day to day are not the same thing.

There's form and there's function. The form is the title: mixer, producer. The functions are what that person does daily, and those are what you're actually signing up for. If you only want the title because someone you admire has it, you'll learn that the path isn't "I'm famous too now." The path is all the boring work, including the parts you might not like, done consistently and at a high level. Brian called it the "why is this snare drum mic buzzing" afternoons.

The big moments are smaller than they look. I had a big speaking gig this year, and people were so excited about it. It was a very cool moment in a complex, challenging year. It's great to tell people. It's a defining moment for the business. It isn't a defining moment for me, the person. I still had to get up the next day.

A Grammy works the same way. Even if you get it, it'll be a moment, and everything before it will have been a race to get there. Who are you after? Who were you during and before? That's really how people will describe you.

What Else We Got Into

• Why young cats falling off things might be the best way to think about experiments
• Blaming "content" for a problem that turns out to be a low resolution upload
• Adding a slot for team learning to project roadmaps back in my corporate days
• Brian's Rick Rubin example, and being clear about what you are and aren't offering
• Being in the right pond with your bait, Brian's brand new fishing metaphor
• The reality checks from peers, friends and coaches that put me on every good path I've been on
• Why the real goal is the families and relationships around every engineer, not just the work

Watch If...

• You're good at mixing and the business still isn't working
• You'd describe your process in three steps
• You've ever said "I'm not a business person"
• You keep saying yes to work you dread
• Your content is mostly about compression, and artists aren't reaching out
• You think this only counts if you do it full-time

Brian came into this with real curiosity and his own stories, and it turned into one of those conversations where you lose track of the time. If you make music in any capacity, the Music Production Podcast is worth the subscribe.